Trimble Business Center

One of my goals this winter is to try and keep as many objects dynamically linked as long as possible throughout the takeoff/modeling process. This will help when there are changes from the engineer, situational changes, or if we need to make accommodations for material (increase/decrease cut and fill). I think this will make re-running takeoff quantities a lot easier and quicker. I had this happen to me on a subdivision project a couple weeks ago where the typical cross section change. Traditionally, this would have taken me a while to manually tweak everything but because I used the corridor function, the changes were a fraction of the time and I felt confident that I did not miss something. 

I have attached a small project below that I feel is a good project to test out because there is a good mix of modeling objects without being to overwhelming. I was able to model this very quickly using the corridor tools and intersection function. Two sections that I was not able to dynamically model where the cul-de sacs. When I tried to model the curb and sidewalk all the way around the cul-de-sac, the linework did not match like it should because it was offsetting the features perpendicular to the alignment and not to the previous feature (which I totally understand why). 

I think the create side slope tool will help with this. The create side slope tool is a very useful feature because it does the same thing as the corridor tool without as much leg work. In the future I would like to see either an addition to this command or a new command that is just as easy to start and use the template but stays dynamic. Currently the tool acts more as a very efficient way of offset (which is great, so please don't interrupt that as being negative). I think a combination between the current capabilities and the surface tie would be great where this side slope acts more like a surface.   

One of the issues is that if my reference line changes horizontally or vertically, I need to rerun the command and make sure I have saved the previous templates. I do not have the ability to change this linestring dynamically once the command has been performed. 

**Correction:The side slope linestrings do update dynamically  when the source reference line is updated.

For now, I am going to take the 3D breakline around the cul-de-sac, create an alignment from this and apply my templates. I think this will be a suitable work around. 

There may be a better way of doing this and if so please let me know. Thank you!

The create Cul-De-Sac has some good potential but I ran into a couple of issues:

1. The Cul-De-Sacs are not always at the end of beginning of an alignment
   • This project is a good example of that
   • I have had other projects with similar issues
   • I could create a duplicate of the alignment but now you have redundant data and you run the risk of one not getting updated correctly. I am not a huge fan of having duplicate alignments unless it is necessary
2. I couldn't get the cross slope of the Cul-De-Sac to model correctly
   • It should be -2% and I was finding that it was ~ -0.33%

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After some further investigation, it looks like the Cul-De-Sac tool does not support Cul-De-Sacs that do not have center islands, such as the Cul-De-Sacs in the sample data provided. 

If I add a center island, I can get the cross slope of the lane to be -2%, but it models the center of the Cul-De-Sac incorrectly because there should not be an island. 

I think two additions to these function under the island type should be:

• no center island
• void
  • This would allow the user to create a void and add any customization they may need for the center island